New‐Build Gentrification and the Everyday Displacement of Polish Immigrant Tenants in Greenpoint,Brooklyn

In response to research that has downplayed or denied the reality of gentrification‐induced displacement, critical urban geographers have called for rethinking the concept of displacement. This article takes up that call by examining the impact of new‐build gentrification on the everyday place‐making abilities of Polish immigrant tenants in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Based on nearly four years of work as a tenant organizer, this article looks at the forms of “everyday displacement”—the ongoing loss of the agency, freedom, and security to “make place”—experienced by immigrant tenants who struggle to remain in the neighborhood. Drawing upon Lefebvre's spatial triad and Blomley's work on the social relations of property, this article argues that everyday displacement is experienced through the production of new spaces of prohibition, appropriation, and insecurity that constitute a form of neighborhood erasure.     

城中村遗产价值——公共地理学视角与深圳案例

运用公共地理学方法,讨论城中村的文化遗产价值。文章考察了新老两代村民和四类不同租户构成的核心群体,对于城中村的认知、记忆和情感的差异与代际隔阂。研究发现,以深圳为案例的南方中国的城中村,出现原住民业主被大量外来租户逐步替代、导致传统宗族村落文化难以后继、并从"落脚城市"向"可居社区"成熟转变的发展趋势。城中村的文化遗产被识别为"半村半城"的混合型生活文化、以乡镇企业工业遗存和非正规经济为代表的生产文化、凝结移民草根之奋斗精神的理性文化,以及凸显城中村生命活体的感性文化等四个类型。文章认为城中村文化遗产的价值,需要通过社会（代际）与地域空间的双重尺度提升,在公共地理学讨论平台,达成共识。     

Hygienisation,Gentrification, and Urban Displacement in Brazil

This article engages recent debates over gentrification and urban displacement in the global South. While researchers increasingly suggest that gentrification is becoming widespread in “Southern” cities, others argue that such analyses overlook important differences in empirical context and privilege EuroAmerican theoretical frameworks. To respond to this debate, in this article, we outline the concept of higienização (hygienisation), arguing that it captures important contextual factors missed by gentrification. Hygienisation is a Brazilian term that describes a particular form of urban displacement, and is directly informed by legacies of colonialism, racial and class stigma, informality, and state violence. Our objective is to show how “Southern” concepts like hygienisation help urban researchers gain better insight into processes of urban displacement, while also responding to recent calls to decentre and provincialise urban theory.     

Deracinated Dispossessions: On the Foreclosures of “Gentrification” in Oakland,CA

This paper challenges dominant geographies of urban theory by conceptualising the dynamics of displacement in Oakland through place‐specific histories of racial/spatial politics. It argues that the repeated transposition of a San Francisco‐based model of “tech gentrification” results in deracinated dispossessions, or accounts of displacement uprooted from grounded histories of racial violence and resistance. It also argues that, while urban scholars acknowledge the role of historical difference in contouring dispossessions in metropolitan versus postcolonial cities, this consideration should be broadened to account for the racial/colonial dimensions of urbanism in the US as well. Treating Oakland as a “crossroads of theory”, this paper joins calls for a deeper engagement between postcolonial urban studies and critical race and ethnic studies from North America. Drawing upon the authors’ activist and empirical work, it contends that “thinking from Oakland” demands a foregrounding of racial capitalism, policing, and refusal.     

Linking Gentrification and Labour Market Precarity in the Contemporary City: A Framework for Analysis

The interplay between intensifying labour market precarity and gentrification constitutes a hitherto under‐researched topic in the fields of labour and urban geography. To rectify this lacuna, we argue that gentrification and labour flexibilisation are both socio‐spatial manifestations of capital's efforts to confront crises of accumulation. Distinguishing between what we call “weak” and “strong” links between them, and drawing upon the concepts of “gentrification‐supporting” and “gentrification‐fostered” labour flexibility, we outline a framework for connecting gentrification and precarity. This allows us to make links between the restructuring of the built environment and the reorganisation of work in the post‐industrial city; it also allows us to show how workers, through their agency, can shape rent gaps in the contemporary city.     

Peripheralization: Theoretical Concepts Explaining Socio-Spatial Inequalities

The current increase in socio-spatial inequalities in Europe has led to a revival of the terms “peripheralization” and “marginalization” in spatial research. In contrast to the geographical notion of a “periphery”, which is synonymous with distance to a centre and being situated on the fringes of a city, region or nation, research on “peripheralization” describes the production of peripheries through social relations and their spatial implications. The main part of the article provides a critical review of theoretical concepts which attempt to explain socio-spatial disparities between centralization and peripheralization processes. This includes theories of economic polarization, social inequality and political power. Building on this, a multidimensional concept of socio-spatial polarization is outlined, one which comprises processes of centralization and peripheralization in economic, social and political dimensions. Finally, implications are drawn for spatial planning regarding the polarization between metropolitan and non-metropolitan regions and areas for further research are highlighted.     

The Post‐Industrial “Shop Floor”: Emerging Forms of Gentrification in San Francisco's Innovation Economy

The San Francisco Bay Area in California is undergoing a technology‐driven wave of growth arguably more thoroughgoing than the first “dot‐com” bubble, fueling hypertrophic gentrification and tales of a deeply class‐divided, “Blade Runner kind of society”. While Silicon Valley is still the industry's employment center, San Francisco is seeing faster tech firm growth, and is transforming its downtown to become more “livable” and promoting public space as key to innovation. In this context, this paper offers a reading of urban public space not just as a consumption amenity but also as the “shop floor” of a labor process that goes beyond the walls of the firm to mobilize the social itself in the production of privately appropriated value. With innovation now the watchword of gentrification, the stakes of this shift oscillate between the total commodification of urban vitality and the recognition of the social process of value production itself.     

边缘化新白领的中产阶层化研究:内容、理论构架与未来

随着国际金融海啸后社会经济矛盾的地理大转移,广大新兴市场化国家内城市新白领阶层的社会经济生境边缘化趋势不可避免。边缘化的新白领必然导致其中产阶层化历程的异化,与常规的中产阶层化特征、机制与社会空间后果相异。本文将新白领及其边缘化中产阶层化机理纳入中产阶层化一般化研究之内,继而构建新白领中产阶层化研究理论构架,以便进一步补充、完善一般中产阶层化理论体系。最终,希望为"十二五"以来面临新转型的中国大城市内城再城市化、更新和转型提供一些发展引导思路。     

Ethnic return migration and the nation‐state: encouraging the diaspora to return ‘home’

ABSTRACT. Countries of immigration are generally faced with a dilemma: they wish to accept immigrants for economic purposes, but also to restrict immigration for ethnonational reasons. This is especially true in ethnic nation‐states, where immigration is seen as a threat to ethnonational unity more than in civic nation‐states. However, in recent decades, various ethnic nation‐states have adopted immigration policies that have encouraged their diasporic descendants born and raised abroad to return to their ethnic homeland. Ethnic return migration apparently solves the immigration dilemma by providing ethnic nation‐states with a much‐needed unskilled labour force without causing ethnonational disruption because the immigrants are co‐ethnic descendants. After comparing ethnic return migration policies in European and East Asian countries, this article analyses the development of such policies in Japan and their eventual failure to solve the country's immigration dilemma. As a result, Japan (and other ethnic nation‐states) have imposed restrictions on ethnic return migration.     

Between nation and state: `fractured' regionalism among Palestinian-Arabs in Israel

Theories of nationalism have often overlooked variations in ethnic spatial settings, and have too easily subsumed nation and state. But nationalism surfaces in a variety of dynamic forms, such as among homeland ethnic minorities `trapped' within states controlled by others. In such cases `ethnoregional' identities often emerge, combining ethnonational and civic bases of identity with attachment and confinement to specific places or territories. Ethnoregional movements denote spatial and political entities which mobilise for rights, resources and political restructuring within their states. This is the case in the Israeli Jewish `ethnocracy', where an oppressed Palestinian-Arab minority resides in stable but confined enclaves which make up an Arab `fractured' region. The spatial, socioeconomic and political characteristics of the Arab struggle in Israel provide early signs for the emergence of an ethnoregional movement. This movement is creating a new collective identity, situated between Palestinian nation and Jewish nation-state. The ethnoregional interpretation challenges existing accounts which perceive the minority as either politicising or radicalising, and points to a likely Arab struggle for autonomy, equality and the de-Zionisation of Israel. Arab mobilisation also resembles other ethno-regional movements, whose persistent struggles expose embedded contradictions in the global `nation-state' order.     

Gentrification Interrupted in Salford,UK: From New Deal to “Limbo‐Land” in a Contemporary Urban Periphery

This paper examines two potential lacunae in understanding low‐income residents’ experiences of contemporary state‐led gentrification via a study of neighbourhood restructuring in Salford, UK, 2004–2014. The first is the localised politics preparing the ground for neighbourhood “redevelopment” and housing demolition. The second is the blighted social landscape which emerges with the subsequent stalling of this project. A focus on “before” and “after” is adopted in order to disrupt the linear policy and “effects” temporalities that much qualitative gentrification research tends to inhabit. We see how state‐led neighbourhood restructuring does not simply displace, but carries residents from “empowerment” to abandonment and transfers them from active struggle into devitalised limbo. As such, the paper demarcates challenges and opportunities for resident mobilisation inherent in a vacillating urban renewal programme, powerful in its inception but which has since “hit the buffers” (Lees 2014, Antipode 46(4):921–947) in light of global and municipal fiscal crises.     

The Urban Injustices of New Labour's “New Urban Renewal”: The Case of the Aylesbury Estate in London

This paper discusses the urban injustices of New Labour's “new urban renewal”, that is the state‐led gentrification of British council estates, undertaken through the guise of mixed communities policy, on the Aylesbury estate in Southwark, London, one of the largest council estates in Europe. In this particular case of post‐political planning I show how the tenant support for the regeneration programme was manipulated and misrepresented and how choices were closed down for them, leaving them ultimately with a “false choice” between a regeneration they did not want or the further decline of their estate. I look at what the estate residents thought/think about the whole process and how they have resisted, and are resisting, the gentrification of their estate. I show revanchist and post‐political practices, but ultimately I refuse to succumb to these dystopian narratives, very attractive as they are, for conflict/dissent has not been completely smothered and resistance to gentrification in and around the Aylesbury is alive and well. I argue that we urgently need to re‐establish the city as the driver of democratic politics with an emancipatory agenda, rather than one that ratifies the status quo or gets mired in a dystopic post‐justice city.     

Governing the Commercial Streets of the City: New Terrains of Disinvestment and Gentrification in Toronto's Inner Suburbs

This paper explores the commercial shopping street as a site of racialized class struggle. The argument builds around the study of a disinvested inner‐suburban neighbourhood in Toronto, which furnishes an ideal case through which to achieve the paper's objectives of, first, identifying commercial space as an important site of contestation over competing suburban futures; second, delineating how processes of racialization inform the economies of commercial gentrification and urban renewal; and third, highlighting the epistemological and theoretical insights that emerge when research is conducted collaboratively, among academic, community, and activist groupings. The paper argues that such commercial spaces play a key role in making the city accessible to vulnerable and marginalized groups. Two competing planning agendas centred on reordering commercial space, meanwhile, spell the almost‐certain demise of such arrangements: a “real estate” vision featuring new condominium developments, and a new urbanist resistance favouring “green” and “creative” alternatives. Our engagements with precarious, predominantly immigrant‐owned businesses and community‐based researchers reveal the complicity of both modes of development planning with processes of displacement and structural racism. Specifying these dynamics as “racialized class projects” opens up space for intervention and organizing.     

“Participation”, White Privilege and Environmental Justice: Understanding Environmentalism Among Hispanics in Toronto

Abstract: The environmental justice movement has highlighted not only the unequal distribution of environmental hazards across lines of race and class, but also the white, middle‐class nature of some environmentalisms, and broader patterns of marginalization underlying people's opportunities to participate or not. There is a significant body of work discussing Hispanic environmental justice activism in the US, but not in Canada. This paper draws on interviews with representatives of organizations working on environmental initiatives within the Hispanic population of Toronto, Canada to explore definitions of and approaches to environmentalism(s) and community engagement. Four interrelated “mechanisms of exclusion” are identified in this case study—economic marginalization; (in)accessibility of typical avenues of participation; narrow definitions of “environmentalism” among environmental organizations; and the perceived whiteness of the environmental movement. Taken together, these mechanisms were perceived as limiting factors to environmental activism in Toronto's Hispanic population. We conclude that the unique context of Toronto's Hispanic community, including contested definitions of “community” itself, presents both challenges and opportunities for a more inclusive environmentalism, and argue for the value of “recognition” and “environmental racialization” frameworks in understanding environmental injustice in Canada.     

Infrastructural Activism: Google Bus Blockades,Affective Politics,and Environmental Gentrification in San Francisco

Between 2013 and 2018, the San Francisco Bay Area saw the rise of “Google bus blockades”—a form of protest against gentrification, growing inequality and a housing crisis linked to the economic impacts of the technology sector on the region. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with housing activists in the San Francisco Bay Area, this article argues that the disruptive tactic of “the Google Bus blockade” can be understood as a form of infrastructural activism—a flexible political form that uses the interruption of infrastructure for political ends. The blockades politicised the “Google buses” and transformed them into symbols of gentrification and sites of resistance. Protestors constructed a political analysis that drew connections between struggles for housing, racial and environmental justice and brought together material, affective and political critiques of infrastructure.     

“They Will Take the Country from Us”: Labor Zionism,the Origins and Legacy of the “Other” in Israeli Mass Media,and Hegemonic Narratives

After 1948, Israel's governing elites embarked on a rigorous program of state building and settling hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants. In the process, the elites, primarily from the leading Mapai party, developed a process of othering Jewish immigrants from Arab countries, Arab citizens, and Orthodox Jews. They were physically segregated in their own schools and communities, and the elite culture described them as a threat against the European culture of Jewish immigrants from central Europe. The process targeted Mizrahi Jews before moving on to deplore the “demographic threat” of Orthodox Jews and resulted in the current normative hegemonic discourse in Israel that paints numerous groups as threatening the state. This article proposes a four‐part model for understanding “the other” in Israel: contemporary denial and nostalgia for a homogenous past, the view of Zionism as a civilizing mission, the application of separation of ethnic groups in planning, and demographic fear of the other. Altogether, they paint a picture of an Israel that has not come to grips with its past, and therefore continues the process of “othering” in its contemporary ethnocratic framework. Combining the analysis of geographic separation, and planning and media, it presents an innovative understanding of Israeli society.     

Performing Rootedness in the Negev/Naqab: Possibilities and Perils of Competitive Planting

Through ethnographic and historical analysis of the Negev region of Israel, this article examines competitive planting as a common tool in land conflicts. In a context of disputed land ownership, some Bedouin Arab residents plant crops in defiance of government policy. Government enforcers of land‐use regulations destroy many of these crops and engage in counterinsurgent tree‐planting. I suggest that planting is such a potent tactic because it draws on “environmental idioms” of agricultural labor, the rootedness of trees, and a fundamental Jewish‐Arab opposition that have been central to the development of both Israeli and Palestinian nationalisms. For Bedouin Arabs, whose relationship to both nationalisms has long been contested, the multivalent symbolism of planting makes it a particularly promising tactic for asserting land claims. Further, I contend that these plantings demonstrate both the power of environmental idioms to structure land claims along ethnic lines and the creative potential of participants to challenge dominant environmental discourses by adding new connotations.     

Determinants of Net Migration to Rural Areas,and the Impacts of Migration on Rural Labour Markets and Self-Employment in Rural Sweden

Abstract

Across most of Europe, the countryside seems to show a polarized development in which large districts are depopulating, while certain areas, mainly around big- and mid-sized cities, are increasing in population. The latter development is often described in concepts of “rural gentrification” and “rurbanization”, symbolizing a transformation of rural communities to communities with urban values and lifestyles. Most studies of the effects of these processes have focused on social and cultural consequences, as e.g. the displacements of lower-income households with higher-income residents and of rural culture and values with urban ones. This paper examines the phenomenon from another perspective, namely the effects of the “rurbanization” processes on countryside's labour markets and economic life. This paper aims at analysing the determinants of net migration to rural areas in general and to different types of regions, and the impacts of in-migration on rural labour markets, self-employment and other socio-economic conditions in Sweden for the period of 2003–2005. We find that net migration into rural areas increases with the size of adjacent local and regional centres, whereas net migration decreases with the average commuting distance of workers in the rural areas. When comparing in-migrants to rural areas with rural area stayers, our results indicate that the former has lower incomes, a lower employment ratio and a lower degree of entrepreneurial activities. These differences could—at least partly—be explained by the fact that rural area stayers were on average 6 years older than rural area in-migrants, i.e. the two groups were in different stages of their life cycles.     

The Historiography of Deir Yassin

This article describes Israeli and Arab historiography concerning the events in the Arab village of Deir Yassin in April 1948, during the first Israeli–Arab war, of 1948. It begins with the internal, left–right Israeli controversy during 1969–71 about the alleged massacre and then describes and analyses what “really” happened at Deir Yassin on the basis of the Israeli (and, to a smaller extent, British) documentation from 1948 that has been declassified over the last few years. It then concludes by describing the evolution of the Israel and Palestinian histographical narratives on the event.     

Class,Citizenship and Regeneration: Glasgow and the Commonwealth Games 2014

Abstract: Through a focus on “consumer‐citizenship” this paper foregrounds the class practices inherent in urban regeneration. Using Glasgow's 2014 Commonwealth Games (CWGs) as an illustrative example of regeneration, it seeks to highlight the market‐led processes that underpin state interventions. The paper demonstrates how these processes are implemented to transform “problem people, and problem places” ( Damer 1989 , From Moorepark to “Wine Alley”) into sites of “active” consumption and “responsible” citizenship. Yet, access to this “consumer citizenship” is stratified. In doing so, we synthesise conceptual insights from the Marxist‐influenced gentrification literature and the Foucauldian‐inspired housing renewal literature. We forward this to initiate further academic debate and empirical enquiry on the specific issue of mega sporting events.